Proceeds from ICOs this year have already surpassed the record amount raised in all of 2017 even as regulators across most jurisdictions clamp down on offerings and incidents of fraud continue.
The impressive 2018-numbers are partly owed to some gigantic ICO’s such as Telegram, the Venezuelan Petro or Block.one. The Russian guys around the founder Pavel Durov raised $1.7 billion with the issuance of its Gram token. The proceeds will be used to build the TON (Telegram Open Network), a blockchain-based platform that extends its messaging app into a range of services including payments, file storage, censorship-proof browsing and decentralized apps hosted on the platform. To call the TON project ambitious would be an understatement.
The Petro, launched in February 2018, has been issued by the government of Venezuela and raised some US$ 735 million in a private pre-sale according to CoinSchedule.
Block.one, the Cayman Islands-based startup that’s behind the EOS token, is about to close its almost year-long ICO with more than UD$4 billion raised in one of the largest ever fundraiser campaigns.
As of June 7, 2018, 417 ICO’s raised more than US$ 9.7 billion. Regulators across the world massively cracked down on ICO’s but the number of ICO’s conducted is still increasing month by month. 118 ICO’s raised more than US$ 1.6 billion in May alone.
The global race for crypto-investors’ money still is on. If the trend continues and regulators are not closing down the show in one way or another, it may well be that ICO’s may have raised more than US$20 billion by the end of the year.
